Erica Carter teaches Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. Recently, she published How German is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the consuming Woman (1996), in which she explores how the development of a "social market economy" after 1949 gave a new centrality to consumers as key players in the economic life of the (German) nation and in that process gave women a new public significance. Carter argues that concepts of nationhood survived in the rhetorics of public policy and in popular culture of the period.
Carter's (1984) interesting argument regarding young women and their relationship to consumerism and the market owes much to early feminist critique. Carter insists that the "image industries" are acutely aware of gender difference which operates as a "dominant variable for the construction of consumer groups." She takes the youth subculture theorists to task for not recognizing this. In this case, she focuses on the female consumer in post-war (West) Germany (Gray and McGuigan, 1997, p. 92).
1. introduction
Since the 1970s, theorists of youth subcultures in Britain have appropriated the notion of "style" from marketers of teenage fashion commodities to study oppositional subcultures in the post-war period. Many analysts of sub-cultural deviance and opposition dislike the plastic glamour of commercialized youth culture; they notice subversions of dominant forms (Carter, p. 104). Appropriating commodities from fashion, music, and media industries, subcultural youths reassemble them into symbolic systems of their own, which strike chords of disenchantment, rebellion, and resistance. The analyses themselves are founded on a number of unspoken oppositions: conformity and resistance, harmony and rupture, passivity and activity, consumption and appropriation, femininity and masculinity (Willis, 1977).
Girls are written into youth cultural theory in the language of consumption--initially, as objects for consumption by men. At first, British cultural theorists thought of girls as an absence, a silence, a silence which could only be filled in some separate world of autonomous female culture. Feminist researchers turned to the family as the pivotal point. In following working-class girls into the closed arena of the family, researchers of female culture gained insight into the possibilities of specifically female cultural forms. In this way, they thought of so-called 'bedroom" culture as analogous to male subcultures (p. 105).
Searching for autonomous female cultural forms in the bedroom hideaways of teenage girls has been problematic--in terms of the creative, productive, and potentially subversive power of this mode of femininity. Researchers thought that studying "teeny bopper culture" was the key which would unlock the potentialities of specifically female forms. Subculture theory proved to be an inadequate starting point for studies of female culture.
The spectacle of working-class subcultures erupted into a gap between class relations as they are lived by working-class youth and the classless categories according to which capitalist markets are structured. Ever since W.L. Warner's (1960) classic study of social class in America, the marketing establishment has measured consumers against typological grids on which "class" appears as an attribute of personal status and income; working-class subcultures are (in part) a rejection of a consumer culture which has repressed the seamier side of class subordination (pp. 105-06).
Gender, however, operates as a dominant variable for structuring consumer groups. Market researchers developed a huge apparatus of consumer surveillance which ensures the immediate recuperation and reassimilation of new facets of femininity (p. 106). The "image industries," e.g., fashion, cosmetics, etc., have drawn on these marketing data to produce symbolic representations of female experience. Male semiological analysts plunder the symbolic treasure chest of consumer culture--recreating signifiers of resistance. Analyses of subcultural style tend to represent an attempt to freeze commodities-as-signifiers into fixed relations of subversive opposition, e.g., the (re)marketing of punk safety-pins and crazy-colour hairstyles.
The same has not been true of research into girls' culture. Women researchers have had to plunge into the seeting morass of capital flows, emerging with a proliferation of critiques of the commodities which pattern the fabric of girls' lives: advertising images, fashionable clothes, popular fiction, and so on. In charting female market practices, we find girls and young women in and outside, participating in the organisation and the regulation of market practices. Girls and women surface on a multitude of levels as both objects and agents of market processes, e.g., the 1980s boom in the second-hand rag trade and the New Wave subculture (p. 107).
2. my study
This study reports on research into female "consumer culture" in post-war West Germany, where innovative modes of understanding were developed; it represents an attempt to grasp and to represent aspects of female consumerism in all their myriad complexities. Studying how Germany attempted to build a new democracy out of its Nazi past can shed light on the process which, in Britain, took on less visible forms. Germany in 1945 lacked the cosy security of cultural institutions in which British democratic values were founded; the German constitution of 1949 served as an anchor for this political project. We notice for example the explicit inscription of women and men as equal subjects in legal discourse: however, citizenship for women came to be defined via consumption in a capitalist mass market (p. 107)
research question:
I set out to answer the following research question: In what ways did the market in post-war West Germany colonize and root itself in public discourses and institutions?
It is important to remember that, in 1945, Germany attempted to suffocate its Nazi past under the cushion of consumer democracy; these developments may throw into sharper relief analogous developments in the consumerism of post-war Britain. Here, as in Germany, the middle-class housewife enacted her political enfranchisement through the exercise of her economic rationality, choosing to buy or not to buy. During the 1960s, West Germany urged teenage girls to endorse this "political" future. At the same time, the expanding market in teenage leisure commodities transported adolescent consumption into a separate dimension of "symbolic" and "hedonistic" pleasures.
More precisely, I look at some aspects of the 1950s leisure consumption for girls; more precisely, I look at the ways in which the people who produced Bravo, a magazine geared to helping young women succeed in life) encourage, via such features as the cover, the editorials, the beauty and the fashion columns, and the advertising, their young readers to buy into the culture of self-improvement, promising to help them make the best of their resources in their struggle to turn themselves into "a more beautiful self," focusing on one specific instance of female mass consumption, artificial "silk" stockings" (pp. 108, 115, 119, 120). Heavily laden though nylons may be with predetermined "sexist" meanings, a cool appraisal of the actual mode of their consumption reveals teenage girls engaged in the production of meanings and values more appropriate to their own needs. Nylon stockings, imported from the U.S.A., may be regarded as one of the more visible manifestations of American cultural hegemony. A closer look at this element in an emergent, and largely imported, teenage culture consumption points to different questions we should ask of the process of consumption itself, that is, as passive manipulation or as active appropriation.
3. my approach
Theoretical framework: a neo-Marxist/Feminist version of political economy.
Analytical techniques: interpretation, i.e., an interpretation of socialogical studies of subcultures and "style," government documents, newspaper and trade journal reports, and ethnographic analysis of two individuals, by way of evoking the "lived experience of consumption."
Approaching this topic from a neo-Marxist/Feminist perspective, I note that there are no simple connections between women's position within relations of consumption for the 1950s family and the situation of adolescent girls as consumers on a mass teenage market. From the state's perspective, it was clear that in taking up their position of equality women were seen to be lacking the qualities necessary for democratic citizenship. Since women's assumed tendency to be over-emotional was said to hamper them in the exercise of rational consumer choice, it became the task of both state and private institutions (especially advertising) to educate women into the required patterns of consumption (p. 108).
Initiating girls into new modes of consumption was understood--towards the end of the decade--as a manoeuvre in preparing them for entry into an adult female world. On the one hand, teenage consumption, revolving as it did around leisure commodities, was clearly distinct from that practised by housewives. On the other, the notion of "public" became crucial; for the 1950s housewife, one element of domestic labor (shopping) was lifted out of the enclave of home and transferred to the "public" terrain of the supermarket (pp. 108-09).
Abstract promises of a public identity for women as consumers took form in the reorganization of public space around the idea of commodity exchange. Gradually, stores abandoned "personal service: for up-to-date (American) "self service" methods. A number of stores invited customers to "come in and look around," with no obligation to buy [they would probably buy, given the advertising in the store]. Displays emphasized commodity as image and spectacle, together with labels near individual items. In addition, town planners in Berlin in 1946 further accelerated the centralization of the consumption process, featuring strips of parkland and fast roads what divided residential areas from commercial quarters, sites of work from sites of leisure, including centralized shopping areas (p. 109).
Increasingly, adolescent girls were drawn into this new public space. The new generation of young consumers were attracted to the self-service departments, where they could compare products at their leisure. A 1957 Intermarket survey of West Germany consumer habits showed that teenagers preferred "impersonal" stores, together with "Americanized" off-the-peg items. If girls are absent from subcultures, they became visible at the point of consumption. Working-class girls in particular have never been entirely absent from the street, the cinema, or the dance hall; they have not lived a life of seclusion, away from the eyes of predatory men. A favourite occupation of young female factory workers in the 1950s West Germany was an evening stroll along main street in search of excitement, especially the company of contemporaries. It was shopping which drew them onto the street and into public life.
If the market offers itself to women and girls as a stage for the production of themselves as public beings, it does so on unfavourable terms. The girls, whatever their motive for assembling there, found themselves on display to boys angling for a date--or something more. That is, men had the power to position women as sexual prey, and this made the feminist search for autonomous female subcultures so difficult. If anything is to be learned about the lived realities of consumption, we must shift the terms of the youth culture debate, looking first at the dominant forms of a supposedly conformist culture of consumerism. One route into the project is an examination of teenage lifestyles: of their assemblage on the production line of commodities for the teenage market, and their destruction, appropriate, subversion, and reassemblage by teenage girls themselves (p. 110).
4. key findings
The word "teenager" entered the German langauge in the 1950s--together with words (from the U.S.A.) like chewing gum and Coca-Cola, which conveyed connotations of crazy styles, rock'n'roll parties, park-bench romance, and so on. During this period, the average age at which young people married was twenty-six. A survey showed (in 1961) that the disposable income of young people 21-24 was DM 192 per month for men and DM 180 for young women (p. 110).
On the teenage market, however, girls represented a particularly attractive target for the leisure industries. During their late teens, girls earned a higher income than boys--but dropped back on reaching 20. The most lucrative section of the female market was the group called "Angestellte," the clerical and secretarial workers (p. 111). It was clear to the marketing establishment that the golden egg of the female market had to be cracked with care. The leisure commodities favoured by boys offered pathways to present and immediate pleasures; for girls, so-called leisure commodities embodied their more sober demands for future security in a precarious world. Middle-class girls spent much of their income on collecting such objects as bed clothes, table linen, crockery, cutlery, and glassware, accoutrements for the bourgeois domestic idyll. In this way, she raised her value on the marriage market. By contrast, young men were busy buying cameras, motor-bikes, cars, etc. (p. 111).
private faces in public places
As they entered the post-war market place, girls and women found that whole new areas of their lives opened up, as their lives became the "public" property of marketing institutions. In-depth psychological testing came into vogue with the rise of motivation research, requiring massive apparatus for gathering and processing data on consumer habits, preferences, tastes, and so on (pp. 111-12). The unifying principle of market research techniques was the regulation of information flows--which moved from the consumer upwards to the institutions of image production, where data on consumers would be "processed" before being returned to them in the shape of commodity representations: product design, packaging, advertising, public relations. In this way, knowledge of the consumer was channelled through scientific discourse within which she was placed as object only, never as subject of the consumption process. The process was reversed in commodity representations: the same knowledge was used by the image production industries to construct image commodities-as-symbols, from advertising images to fashionable clothes for a teenage mass market. First, it had to be "translated" from the terms of social science into those of what may be called the "commodity aesthetic" within which consumers were replaced as subjects of consumption practices.
Since the second half of the 19th century, the proliferation and differentiation of public images of and for women has been bound up with their role as consumers. As early as the 1890s, American newspapers discovered that women carried great potential as a future consumer market. During the 1950s, German market researchers turned their attention to the younger generation of female consumers (p. 112). By the early 1960s, Bravo had established itself as a leading light on the developing market for magazines aimed that teenagers; this publication (it was founded in 1956) presented itself as a bridge spanning the gap between commodity producers, advertisers, and consumers; its potential for success lay in its proven ability to capture and sustain a loyal readership amongst young people between the ages of 12 and 24. In offering advertising space to the producers of commodities for teenagers, it could ensure the dissemination of commodity representations amongst a teenage public constituted as such primarily through their role as consumers (pp. 112-13).
The publishers of Bravo thought that their readers (aged 12-24) would be "taken seriously" as consumers; that is, they argued that teenagers needed a mouthpiece through which they could air their grievances, and it was in this capacity that they offered their magazine to the public. Accordingly, Bravo was to legitimize its own innovations in the field of popular taste, that is, determining that the mode of teenage rebellion would be aesthetic, not political (p. 113).
girls in teenage lifestyle
The discourse of marketing defines lifestyles in terms of specific configurations of commodity ownership which characterize particular consumer groups. During the 1950s, market researchers in Germany looked to sources outside classical economics for more finely differentiated analyses of potential target groups. Consumption theorists set about recuperating information gathered in cultural anthropology, sociology, and psychology. Classical political economy tended to neglect the consumer or to consider consumption in relation to the economics of commodity production and distribution. A new generation of consumption theorists argued for a new sophisticated awareness of the classical and the aesthetic dimensions of commodity use. For example, Wilhelm Vershofen (1954) proposed that the concept of commodity use value should be broken down into three analytical components: (1) basic original use value, (2) social use value, measured against variables such as social prestige, and (3) aesthetic use value, measured against standards of social taste (pp. 113-14).
The aesthetic principle regulating consumer lifestyles as a unity of form which bound separate elements through which they were constructed. Part of the function of teenage commodities was to provide aesthetic forms for a "cultural" space (adolescent leisure culture); however, female and male consumers inhabited this space differently. For most middle-class and working-class girls, home, the workplace, and the street, where they shopped during the daytime and strolled by night, were sites of labor and leisure. The "image industries," including the female mass media and the fashion and the cosmetics industries, deemed that for the female consumer the body (as opposed to any geographical location) would be the focal point of leisure, pleasure, and personal freedom. A glance at the 1950s fashion images shows that designers engaged in the business of sculpting/shaping/moulding ever more imaginative feminine forms. The Bravo beauty-care columnist helped young girls slip into these new forms. In addition, the beauty-care columnist taught readers the techniques of body culture and maintenance, so that each part of the body could be shaped and trained, e.g., leg maintenance (p. 114).
In addition, Bravo reinforced certain conventions of poise, gesture, and body shape via its popular cultural discourses, that is, in its talk of film, television, fashion, rock and pop music, and so on (pp. 114-15). To promote the perfect female leg, for example, Bravo emphasized long, sweeping lines, accentuated by high-heeled shoes tapering down to a pointed toe. Representative figures embodied perfection: Marlene Dietrich's legs, Sophia Loren's hips, and Brigette Bardot's curves. Beauty-care columnists exhorted girls to invest time and money on body maintenance, grooming and dressing with care, aspiring to the "perfect female self," the desired product remaining just out of reach. In this way, Bravo offered its female readers a way out of this predicament: that is, it offered "instructions on how to make the best of [their] own resources." The magazine celebrated no single image of femininity, but instead offered a set of aesthetic principles as instruments for constructing a more beautiful self (p. 115).
consumption as cultural practice
In the sections above we have seen how, in Germany during the 1950s, capital organized commodity markets so as to expand the boundaries of female consumption. This (gendered) survey helps us identify the perspectives future work on gender and consumption will have to take (pp. 115-16). In the first instance, capital dictates the forms which commodity consumption takes; yet the market depends upon the development (by the female consumer) of specific sets of social competences and skills, from the rational decision-making of the housewife to the teenage girl's production of herself as aesthetic object in the symbolic configuration of teenage lifestyles (p. 116).
"Consumption" means many things to many people, from symbolic readings of commodities, representations, processes of sensual gratification, practices of economic and cultural exchange. The so-called "sphere of consumption can be broken down into a multiplicity of complex forms, relations, and practices on each level of consumption, female consumers engaging with the "market machine" in different ways, activating multiple sets of functions, meanings, and values in the commodities they consumer. Bravo fashion advisers set out explicit and implicit rules for producing teenage style via the consumption of fashion commodities.
Feminist research into female practices of consumption will have to include analyses of these rules and conventions. Highlighting the mechanisms of control which capital deploys, they fail to evoke the experiential quality of consumer education for women and girls. Biographical narratives offer one way of bridging this gap, showing how individuals negotiate dominant forms. I end this series of case studies in gender and consumer culture with two narratives, a fictional filmic narrative and a biography taken from an account of ethnographic field-work in the 1950s. Positioned within radically different contexts, their common feature is the central significance accorded to one commodity: stockings. By 1961, nylon had swamped the young female market in West Germany; surveys show that 85 per cent of "Bravo girls" between the ages of 12 and 24 (compared with 80 per cent of non-readers in the same age group) to be wearing seamless stockings. These figures can be read neither as indicators of girls' blind submission to the dictates of the market nor as indicators that females capitulated to fetishistic "male" fantasy. The all-pervasiveness of synthetic silk stockings begs different questions: What were the sources of their popularity, and how were they actually consumed? (p. 116).
a. Ninotchka
During the 1950s, Bravo ran a series of advertisements for "Opal" seamless stockings, depicting crossed female legs, long and sophisticated, emerging from the folds of an elegant black dress. The magazine ran, parallel to this campaign, reports on Silk Stockings (1954), Cole Porter's musical remake of Ernst Lubitsch's film Ninotchka (1939), starring Greta Garbo, which celebrates the attractions of western democracy, in terms of the freedom to acquire consumer goods, silk stockings for example (pp. 116-17).
Consumers of "symbolic commodities" have preferred textual sources from which they draw the meanings with which those commodities are invested. Bravo served as one such source for teenage consumers, and in 1958 it offered its readers a range of texts in which synthetic silk (nylon or Perlon) stockings were encoded into new configurations of meaning. In part, these were drawn from the symbolic field of meanings around genuine silk, with its traditional associations exoticism, sensuality, luxury, and mystery: the legend of the Chinese princess said to have discovered the secret of the silkworm more than 5,000 years ago: or the two sixteenth-century monks reputed to have smuggled the eggs of the silkworm out of China to the court of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian. But the additional glamour of the American nylon has origins elsewhere. By the 1950s, images of stockinged female legs represented freedom, democracy, the American way of life. The musical Silk Stockings contributed to this myth (p. 117).
At the end of the narrative, Ninotchka becomes a "true" woman, i.e., via (1) her romantic association with a Western man and (2) her consumption of fashion commodities for the feminine woman. The Bravo review of Silk Stockings becomes instrumental in the production of a store of meanings around which synthetic silk hose, from which teenage consumers drew their meanings (pp. 117-18). The enigma of Ninotchka's transformation is the question of her possible transformation into a "true" woman, a question answered at the end of the narrative in the language of female submission, that is, she capitulates to imperialist drives (p. 118).
b. Annette
Between 1955 and 1957, a West German social worker, Renate Wald, compiled a collection of biographical monographs of working-class factory girls, which were later published in Wurzbacher and Jaide's Die Junge Arbeiterin (1958). She drew on a pool of ethnographic research conducted by a team of participant observers, all of whom had lived and worked as factory employees. One girl, Annette, worked with her mother in a textile factory (p. 118). An only child, she spent much of her "leisure time" at home with the family, helping her mother around the house or enjoying precious moments of lazy conversation when her chores were finally done. Annette's mother, wary of the dangers of possible sexual adventures, was unwilling to allow her to develop close friendships with young people of either sex. At the age of 15, Annette still amicably complies with her mother's wishes, remaining a model daughter in almost all respects, including her taste in clothes. Although mother and daughter rarely fight, they clash over one point: the Perlon stockings which Annette wears to work every day. They cannot stand the rigors of shop floor labour; inevitably, Annette wears out two or three pairs a week. Annette spends her weekly pocket money on biscuits and sweets, and her mother is thus forced to replenish her stock of nylons out of the housekeeping money, and this makes the latter very angry (pp. 118-19).
In this context, Annette's conflict with her mother over stockings centred on practices of day-to-day consumption (it marks the displacement of potentially more grandiose demands for self-determination onto the only site where realistically they may be met. Via the "built-in-obsolescence" of the stockings Annette expressed a disregard for her mother's principle of moderation in all things, a principle to which she otherwise strictly adhered. Mass commodities demand to be consumed to excess: Annette, unconsciously perhaps, took them at their word (p. 119).
5. concluding remarks
As work on male youth subcultures has traced the "hidden contradictions" which they "magically resolved (Hebdige, 1979, p. 18), so Annette's biography can shed light on some of the ways in which girls live out the contradictions of their lives via a culture of consumption. Her reformulation of the logic of built in obsolescence took place within a teenage consumer culture; for her, hedonic consumption became a practice of rejecting the dominant codes of social taste (p. 119).
Feminists have commonly represented the 1950s as an age of repressive quiescence, in which women's dissatisfaction with their feminine lot was successfully obscured and silenced. Since Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique (1963), the blame for widespread female malaise has been laid at the door of capitalist marketeers, to whom is ascribed the ability to seduce women into slavish submission to the authority of the market. But was "consumerism" an adequate name for the problems of the female condition? Consumerism not only offers, but also fulfils, its promise of everyday solutions to problems, the origins of which lie elsewhere. In post-war Germany, women were constrained to search beyond national boundaries for female cultural forms. Donning the accoutrements of an American female ideal--nylon stockings, scarlet lipstick, narrow skirts, and high-heeled shoes--represented disapproval of a public disavowal of fascist images of femininity: scrubbed faces shining with health etc. Female "resistance" of the period was not so much silenced as pitched at a different level from that of earlier campaigns for women's equality or later feminist struggles against women's commoditization and objectification on a capitalist market (p. 120).
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